all trussed up and nowhere to go

Yesterday I went to the hospital and had a lumbar epidural. The night before, I had had a very scary dream about the procedure, where I was on a table that kept going higher and higher up towards the ceiling. (Trust me, it was scary.) The table that I was eventually put on for the epidural was not unlike the table in my dream, so I panicked a bit when I first went in the room.

During the epidural itself I was face-down on this table with my shirt pulled up and my pants and undies pulled down below my butt. This would have been sort of humiliating and fear-inducing, to be offered up on a table like that, but it was so humorous to me to be so hapless that I couldn’t find any actual fear or shame. If I turned my head to the left I saw needles and little bottles of medicine, and if I turned my head to the right I saw manuals and supply cabinets, so I kept my head to the right. I apparently did “outstanding”, according to the very nice doctor. It was not very painful, and not even very weird, and I got to stay and look at my fluoroscopy and ask questions of the very nice (and patient) doctor.

BF was there almost the whole time, supportive and sweet. He helped me out to the parking garage – my leg was partially numb and my knee very unpredictable – and got me Noodles & Company for lunch after it was all over. I told my mom that my knee felt nothing like an articulated joint, that it felt like a straw with a bend in it, and she thought this was a fantastic description. I felt fine after, aside from the slowly-dissipating anxiety I had that something would go wrong (working at a medical malpractice firm is not very helpful when you have to rely on doctors for things like this), and I feel more or less normal today. I took it really easy afterward, anyhow, trying to reduce the chances of some weird after-effect and also happy for an excuse to baby myself.

This morning, I have a lot of soreness at the injection spot, especially when I twist or bend the wrong way. I am hoping this will go away as the hole in my back heals.

At work, apparently a hissy fit was thrown in my absence about a few things that are in my purview and non-negotiable, and I don’t really know what to do about that. Since it seems to be a cyclical process – hissy fits are thrown, things are cleaned up, and then they go back to the way they were because it doesn’t make sense to change them – I am not terribly worried, but I can’t get over the knee-jerk red-eared reaction that it reflects on my job performance somehow. (Logically, it doesn’t.)

Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s going to be a fun couple of weeks.

out there in the rain

Well, fuck.

awesome.

On an errand for work today, an old Studebaker turned left in front of me. It was painted rainbow-colored all over – exactly like Fozzie’s Studebaker from The Muppet Movie…

A bear in his natural habitat.

…although not nearly so detailed. Boy, did that make my day.

oh man, this jive has me in a trance

One of my posts showed up on Technorati the other day, apparently. I don’t actually know what that site does – is it one of those aggregate sites, where content editors troll the web looking for stuff to post that’s interesting? I don’t know. I’m not really in on Web 2.0. (I am not actually looking for any kind of explanation, o helpful readers. Unless you want to explain how one of my posts got there.) In the same vein, I am close to 1,000 comments! I will congratulate whoever hits #1,000 with…notification that they were the 1,000th commenter. And a hearty “Good for you!”

So I built up my courage and I talked to Paul before class, telling him that I thought his alignment practices were not working for my body. He found the phrase “aggressive alignment” interesting, and told me that he was so glad to hear from me about excess pain that his instructions were causing so he could, you know, stop instructing me like that. He said he would be thinking about what I’d said for a couple of weeks, and generally it worked out well instead of badly. It may even strengthened the student/teacher relationship – I got more strongly that vibe of “I’m enjoying working with you” from Paul. I was petrified before class, and thought about a) just not going to class with him ever again and not explaining, b) not saying anything and suffering through another alignment-focused class, or c) failing to do any of the stuff he asked me to do that caused me pain, without comment. Not one of these options sounded at all good to me so I bit the bullet. Yet again, the right thing to do was the wise thing to do and it turned out fine. When am I going to learn this for good?

Class itself was terrific. We did ashtanga-style sun salutations, three each of A and B, and then a bunch of work on shoulder opening, eka pada rajakapotasana, and natarajasana, which I was seriously kicking some ass in. I think the heavy warmup of the sun salutations gave me some good grounding, and I had one of those balance days where I felt like I could just stay in it forever. There was even time for savasana! (Paul usually runs out of time for savasana.) It was hot in the studio yesterday afternoon, so I was sweating through all this and feeling great. Really nice practice.

Then I went to the community college. The teacher in CivPro decided to show us a movie about the legal process in the last couple of classes, and he said it was called The Staircase. I’d never heard of it, but hey, I like movies, right? No problem. Well, it’s not a movie, it’s a six-hour miniseries, a documentary, and I have no idea why he thought that showing six hours of documentary was at all a good idea for this class. He split it up, three hours last night and three hours next week, but STILL, that’s insane.

The case is quite interesting. It’s a murder from 2001 in Durham, NC, and partway through the second 1-hour segment last night I looked it up on my laptop – oh, how I love the internet – and was surprised to find that the guy was convicted. The documentary is strongly slanted towards the defendant and his innocence, but even with my cynical view it still seemed to me like one of those cases where reasonable doubt would kick in for an acquittal. Both theories of the woman’s death, murder and accident, have major puzzlements in them.

The defendant was a local columnist, and had written critically about the problematic racial divides in Durham. He was explaining his point of view somewhat cryptically at one point, and Cop Lady, next to me (the one who deliberately brought up her ancestors’ slavery in a previous class), kept saying “What’s your point?” and “What are you getting at?”. (We were all talking back to the screen after a few minutes of watching, so it wasn’t weird in itself.) It was extremely defensive, and I wanted to turn to her and say “Let it go, already, he’s on your side. Most of us are.”

I left at 8:45, when the third hour was just starting, because I wanted to go home and eat dinner before I had to go to bed. BF had made a recipe that we watched Ingrid make on “Simply Delicioso” over the weekend, full of dairy and vegetables, and I was looking forward to trying it. It was tasty, but not as good as the show made it look, and BF said it wasn’t at all worth the amount of time and effort he had to put into it.

He also called an AC guy, who is hopefully at our house at this very moment looking at our AC. I think last night I’d gotten used to it, because I slept well, but it will obviously be better to get it fixed.

A case that has been dogging the firm for a couple of years with its uncertainty and its incredibly depressing client settled yesterday. I am a happy, happy person because of this. Despite the exceptionally intelligent men with leaf-blowers who sprayed all the pollen in the parking lot straight into the air just as I was arriving at work this morning, I feel good about being at work today.

Famous last words, I’m sure. Eh, I’ll tempt fate anyway.

I need another weekend to rest up from the weekend

Sneezing, itchy ears;
The heat has weakened me, and
the weekend has too.

We discovered during the insanely weird heat wave we had this weekend – both days it got over 90F – that our air conditioning is broken. YAY. I thought I would enjoy the chance to live in the ambient temperature instead of constantly breathing recycled, refined air as I do all day and most of the night, but after sleeping in it and watching TV in it and cooking in it and then sleeping in it again I was ready for some expensively cooled air to come drifting out of the vents. (Our house is poorly insulated – cold in the winter, hot in the summer.) MTAE, if you have any experience in HVAC, tell us why our air conditioner isn’t working. The device in the furnace room is continually making a sound like it’s trying to kick on but isn’t able to, there’s a funky melted-rubber kind of smell coming out of the vents, and the actual A/C unit that’s on the side of the house is working away just fine.

Also, the maple pollen appears to have bloomed here over the weekend. I’m not all that bad with allergies – I sneeze a bit more, my eyes get dry, and that spot under my ears inside my head that I can’t possibly scratch itches like mad – and they go away quickly, but it’s still tiresome. Poor BF is sneezy and nose-blowy and miserable during allergy season.

Yesterday we went over to the family friends’ house, went to Great Falls (which was really cool! We want to go again), and ate dinner over there. I misread an email and assumed that we would eat a late lunch when we got there, so I arrived starving and found out that we were going to go to Great Falls and then come back and eat dinner. So I inconvenienced everyone by having to buy something from the little canteen at the place and I felt awful. In any case we all had a nice time, but BF and I came back exhausted and went to bed at like 9:15.

It’s true that the heat all weekend tired us out, but having events to go to on both Saturday and Sunday was what really did us in. I feel embarrassed about the fact that I just can’t manage to be too active on the weekends or I wind up depressed and exhausted, but it’s just how I am. I had such a hard time getting started this morning and even now I wish I could go home and go back to bed. In the sauna that is our house.

hi, april, it’s summer. I’m a little early.

I had a very gory, very frightening nightmare last night. I’ve thankfully forgotten most of it, but it was the kind of dream that would have made my mother say “See? See? I TOLD you not to read all that Stephen King.”

Yesterday was downright hot here, and humid, and generally when things start going from breezy, pleasant, springy to sweaty and summery, I am happy. I like the summer; I like the heat. But yesterday I was uncomfortable. Partly because I felt sorry for BF – he has a much higher index of discomfort in the heat than I do – but partly because I would have liked it to be breezier and springier rather than hot. I’m worried I may have been transformed into a pod person overnight.

We went out in the morning, and I bought an expensive pair of sandals that I really shouldn’t have bought at this time since I’m trying to save for 80 different things right now, but I am tired of having three pairs of sandals that aren’t comfortable and wanted to buy Merrells, so I did, and they gave me blisters anyway. I am mad about this because I spent so much on them. Most pairs of sandals, even flip flops, give me blisters until my feet get used to where they rub on me, but it was still bothersome.

In the afternoon we went to the memorial for my friend’s mother. It was really just a party, and we knew exactly one other person there besides the family, and him only faintly. We talked to each other, stood around, observed. We still can think of thousands of reasons why we don’t want children, and I really am doing better about feeling insecure around other women, especially fashion victims. I am still having a hard time with not wearing makeup, though.

My friend seems to be holding up well. She didn’t look or act as if she was weighted down by grief. I still don’t know what actually happened to her mom, but we’ll see her again next Saturday at our high school reunion so I may get up the nerve to ask (as tactfully as possible) then.

On Friday night we watched Star Trek: First Contact, which neither of us had seen, and there were moments when I seriously thought that my geek gland, or perhaps my head, would explode. The battles were amazing, the Enterprise was tantalizingly beautiful, and the story and script were compelling and well-balanced. Telling three stories at once is no easy matter, and I think Frakes pulled it off. Some of the redesign of the uniforms et al I found unnecessary, but it still looked nice. And a drunken Troi is a sight to see. I understand that neither of the other two TNG movies I haven’t seen are much good (Nemesis and Insurrection), but shit, we’ve got this one, and Generations was pretty good, too.

Today we’re going to spend some more time outdoors with some friends of my family. These folks have known me since I was in elementary school – the husband served twice with my father and the mother is a good friend of my mother – and they are terrific people so I am always happy to hang out with them. They’re taking us to Great Falls, which I’ve never been to, but I understand it’s…Great. Poor BF, with all this fresh air. I’m afraid he’s going to develop asthma.

I’m resisting the urge to say “it’s just not fair”

So the pain in my lower left back, I suspect, is a nerve irritation in my cervical spine. I spent some time with Gray’s Anatomy and Wikipedia, and explored what makes it worse and better, then I took two Aleve to see if they would eliminate the pain as deftly as they do the pain in my leg, which is also a nerve irritation. Over the course of a half-hour, I felt the pain drain away until it was nearly gone – this was remarkable, I’ve never felt pain gradually diminish like this – and with it, my confidence that I am a healthy person.

I don’t understand. In the last year I have done everything I can to keep myself healthy. I have devoted myself to a diet as free of crap as I can possibly manage. I have done hundreds of hours of yoga. I have made spirulina, green vegetables, fish oil a part of my life. I have tried to think healthy, tried to make my habits as clean as can be. And now I feel just like I did in February 2008 when I sat on the stairs with the Lipitor scrip in my hand and cried to my mother. I had been trying for a year to avoid processed foods, to make recipes as genuinely as they could be made, and in the process I’d apparently gunked up my blood with cholesterol.

Now it’s my spine that’s indicating something I’m doing is wrong. One of the living masters – I think it’s Iyengar – says that the spine is the health of the body. Why is mine failing me, in two places, when my practice has been so carefully focused on making it flexible and strong?

I’m very frustrated. I’m trying hard not to let it get me down in general, just to keep moving, but it’s hard, especially because this pain is so much worse than the leg pain.

There are a few possible lessons that I’m exploring. One, that I need to be more aggressive in telling a teacher what is not feeling good to me. On Monday I plan to tell Paul that I think all the alignment focus is injuring me and I want to lay off. Two, perhaps yet another example of how rushing things in yoga leads to injury; it’s possible that the backbending I have been practicing for a year has made my spine more prone to injury instead of less. Three, and a much larger lesson, I need to disconnect from my body and believe more strongly that I Am More. This has made me yet more obsessive about getting my tattoo sooner rather than later. I’ll explain that another time. Four, and this is more of a life lesson, that the things we do, and the way we try to plan and direct our lives, sometimes have no relationship at all to the things that happen to us. I’ve done everything I can (aside from quitting the job where I have to sit for eight hours) to keep my spine from injury, and my back hurts anyway. To me, this seems to mean that if it’s all part of a plan, it’s not a plan I can take hold of and alter by a mere few lifestyle changes.

meticulous Star Trek discussion

The other night I watched an episode of TNG that means a lot to me – “Tapestry.” If I had to choose one TNG to share with the world, to show how profound and worthwhile the show can be, it would be “The Inner Light”, but “Tapestry” is a close second.

A serious crisis in my life occurred when I was 19. The person who was most closely wrapped up in this crisis other than myself tried to comfort me by explaining the premise of “Tapestry.” I was furious because this person had compared my plight to an episode of The Next Fucking Generation, but the comparison was thoroughly appropriate. This might be part of the reason the episode is so important to me, but the ideas in it are nevertheless compelling.

dun dun dun du-dun dun, I feel free

Yesterday morning, soon after I got to work, I inhaled and felt pain all around my middle back, stretching across and around my ribcage. I breathed deeply and the pain was worse. I drank some water and it eased; I kept breathing, I kept drinking, and ever so gradually it melted away until it was aching only in one long swath beginning under my left shoulderblade and tapering off around my left side.

By 2:30 PM I was having trouble concentrating on my work. The pain was there, I had had a hypoglycemic attack and was still feeling the effects after shoving a bowl of soup in my mouth, my head was starting to throb again and I was feeling claustrophobic and closed-in in my office. EP kept emailing me with more and more work. I was keeping up, though, and when I finally finished everything around 3:45 I got the all-clear from OG and went home early. I had been feeling strongly like I didn’t want to stay in the office from 2:00 or so, but I stayed on because that’s what you do, you stay at work all day. Around 3:20 I thought, you know what? It’s a free country, after all. I have built up nearly two years of solid work cred here. I’m never sick and I never leave early. I’m allowed to go home if I feel rotten once in a while.

So that’s what I did. And I’m really glad. I went home, I opened a window, and I did a stretchy, calm yoga practice with fresh air blowing on my face and body. The pain in my back felt like it was tracing the latissimus dorsi muscle, so I thought I must have somehow strained it. I tried stretching it out, and by the end of the practice it felt substantially better, but the pain crept back over the rest of the evening and didn’t go away overnight. It hurts most strongly when I am twisting into it. If it’s not decreased or gone by tomorrow I’m going to call the ortho doctor. (This would probably be a job for my primary doctor, because the internet says that pain like this could be any number of things unrelated to muscle or bone, but I don’t trust my primary doctor.) It feels muscular, but so did the pain in my leg that turned out to be a nerve problem.

The practice yesterday provided me with a nice epiphany, too, along with clearing up the closed-in, unbalanced feeling I was having. I was doing balance poses, looking steadily at the green grass outside my window. I was thinking that I liked this so much better than struggling into balance poses the way I do in class. I was particularly thinking of the balance poses that Paul had me do on Monday, where I just couldn’t keep my balance no matter how I tried. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me that he could see I got frustrated easily, and it was really okay, and that I shouldn’t try so hard. I protested (in my mind) that if he’s asking me to do something, I should be able to do it, especially since I was the only person in class.

At home, I have all the time in the world to move in and out of balance poses, and if I can tell that I just don’t have the balance today I can move on to a different set of poses. I don’t have this freedom in class. Hence, I enjoy and am more peaceful about doing balance poses at home, in general. These thoughts led to thoughts about struggling through classes in general, straining to hold warriors as my thighs burn and my stamina whines to a stop, and I suddenly wondered why? Why do I keep going to and striving away in classes that I don’t enjoy because they’re too hard for me? And why is “too hard for me” a measure of me and my ability rather than just the style of the class?

I’ve said before that seeing how long I can hold chaturanga doesn’t do much for me, but that’s really a lot truer than I gave it credit for at the time. I wondered why I was striving so hard, why I chastised myself for not being able to hold warriors as long as they asked me to. Yoga should be something I’m enjoying. Not something I’m pushing myself to do. I have faith that eventually I’ll get into pretzel poses. I don’t have to now. Nor do I have to struggle through excessively physical classes when what I really like is a moderately paced, moderately difficult, meditative class: Noelle’s, Jennifer’s, Betsy’s. The question of how quickly I will improve only going to classes that I am comfortable in is one that I’ve been worrying over for a long time, but after yesterday it’s no longer relevant to me. I think I’ve finally figured out that I’m in this for the long haul, and that I can play my edge less aggressively and still reach my flexibility goals.

Always before I have compared myself to what the teacher has asked me to do. I have thought that either I’m weak or the teacher’s wishes are unrealistic. Neither thing is necessarily true or false. It all just is, and the only problem with any of it is when I generate bad feelings about what I’m doing right now. All I have to do is show up, really. Fuck my own expectations, and anybody else’s as well.

After I was done with my practice, which felt especially spiritual and satisfying, I picked up some Mexican food for dinner and watched TNG for the rest of the evening. BF had to go to the viewing for the friend of MP’s who passed over the weekend, so he didn’t get home until quite late. I missed him, but I was content with my heating pad and the crew of the Enterprise.

Interestingly, after I emailed my teacher to tell her I couldn’t come to the chakra workshop, she emailed the rest of the class and asked them to change the time, because I am a dedicated yogi and I prepaid. I felt AWFUL about this, but she fixed it so that we’ll do all four remaining chakras on a single day, with a potluck lunch, and everyone seems OK with it so I won’t be missing anything after all. I feel guilty still, but it’s done now, and heck, now I’ll get to go to both.

So you’ve probably noticed that I changed up my blog. I’m still hoping to get a custom background for that header with an illustration from the Bradbury short story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed.” I’d wanted to wait until I got the illustration to change the appearance of the blog, but yesterday I had just had enough of the old look and photoshopped up the text I’d decided on with a Mars picture I got from Google. I’ve added an explanation of the new title to my list of pages, or you can just click here.

beans, chakras, etc.

I got a surprise reprieve from class last night. I got to the college, laid on a bench outside for half an hour soaking up the fresh(ish) air, went in to read my book until class started, and the teacher came and told me that more than half the class had emailed to say they wouldn’t be there. We were going to do an in-class assignment on the Bluebook, so she decided to just call it off. So I went home.

I couldn’t figure out what to make for dinner, and I wasn’t all that hungry (!), so I made up a dish, modeled a bit after one of Deb’s recipes but without all the complexity and onions.

Fly Flava Flav Black Beans

1 15-oz can black beans
1/2 cup jarred roasted red peppers, chopped (you could probably roast half a red pepper under the broiler if you wanted to)
2 tbsp chopped cilantro
1/4 cup madeira or dry sherry
Salt & pepper

Drain and rinse the black beans, reserving 1/4 cup of the liquid. Put the beans, peppers, cilantro, madeira, bean water, and 1/4 cup water into a small pot. Bring to a boil and simmer merrily, uncovered, until the liquid is a little more gooey, such that the beans are in a sort of sauce. (I kept them simmering until I was ready to eat them, about 20 minutes, but 10 minutes would probably do it.) Season to taste.

Serves 2 as a main dish, 3-4 as a side.

I actually made an entirely vegan dinner last night. The beans didn’t strike me as being enough for BF, so I also made quinoa timbales with currants and onions and lots of spices (another Deb recipe), and the whole thing didn’t have a bit of animal in it. I love it when I’m able to do that. In this case it was just because I didn’t have any other ideas for a “main” dish, but still.

So my friend is having a memorial (not the funeral – that seems to have been held privately last weekend) for her mother on Saturday from 2-4. Saturday from 1-5 is the next-to-last chakra workshop, and has been planned as such for many weeks. Since my friend’s mom is only likely to die once, I’m probably going to go to the memorial, but I was starting to look forward to the workshop all over again. I am frustrated that this is one of two events, total, that I had immutably planned for this spring, and it’s being disrupted. (Not frustrated at my friend, of course, how would she know and what would she care, but at life, for throwing the two events together.)

This article made me confused. I am a hoarder and always have been, and it’s something I’m trying very hard to move beyond in some ways (overflowing garage), and something I’ve accepted in other ways (nonperishable food stores).  I feel that just-in-time living is all well and good if you have plenty of money, but if not, it doesn’t work. I also think this is a related but very different concept than the yogic one of relying on the universe to give you what you need, something I aspire to. Yet hoarding of the sorts she’s talking about is undeniably unhealthy, especially to the extremes that she discusses. I’m still mulling over it, but the premise of the article seems fundamentally flawed to me. I just can’t figure out quite how.

I’m working on a post about my father and a post about TNG, but this is all I have to say right now. I dreamed last night that Laura was pregnant. I have no idea why. Happy humpday to all.